NAPLES, Fla. — It figures. You go to a women’s golf tournament and a mud wrestling match breaks out. Not here at Tiburon Golf Club, where the best players on the L.P.G.A. Tour will hit their opening shots Thursday and the last one standing Sunday in the season-long Race to CME Globe will walk away with a $1 million bonus.

The parties sullying their reputations in the literary equivalent of a muckfest include two of the legends in the sport: the World Golf Hall of Fame writer Dan Jenkins and the 14-time major winner Tiger Woods. In Jenkins’s corner is Golf Digest, a once-venerable magazine that has become a parody of journalism in its sorrowful effort to stave off irrelevance.

In Woods’s corner, curiously, is Derek Jeter, the former Yankees shortstop. Jeter was above mudslinging as a player, but in retirement he has created a website, The Players’ Tribune, which seems to exist so athletes have a score-settling forum. In his second act, Jeter seems to be saying, “Do as I did not say, not as I did.”

Besides Woods, others with guest turns have included the Los Angeles Clippers star Blake Griffin, who took down Donald Sterling; and the Philadelphia 76ers’ Michael Carter-Williams, who took on the news media, in general, and Stephen A. Smith, in particular (as if Smith, an ESPN personality, is representative of all media, a shaky premise on which to build any solid argument).

Jenkins, the octogenarian who wrote as memorably about golf’s characters in the last half of the 20th century as Mark Twain did about the characters he came across in the last half of the 19th, wrote a “fake” Q. and A. with Woods that Golf Digest chose to trumpet on its cover (and to illustrate with photos of someone who is not Woods).

Jenkins’s written roasts used to be like Woods’s putting: unsurpassed. He once described the golfer Rex Caldwell as “such a hot dog there isn’t enough mustard in America to cover him.” If Ted Bishop had been that clever in tweaking Ian Poulter, he never would have been deposed as the president of the P.G.A. of America.

In his latest satirical effort, Jenkins aimed for parody but succeeded only in satirizing his own writing. The Woods piece was a character assassination using a dull knife instead of Jenkins’s usual gun with the “Bang!” flag.

He took shots at Woods for being a stingy tipper and a serial pink-slip giver. Which was weird, because Woods has spoon-fed satirists plenty of material during his injury-ravaged 2014. He has spoken like a broken record of having to “get my explosiveness and my fast twitch going,” which Jenkins might have pointed out were never thoughts that Ben Hogan entertained all the years he was splitting the fairways with his drives.

Jenkins built an indelible body of work on rolling with his first impression. But in this Internet age, when information gets stale faster than your breath after a venti double-shot nonfat latte, fresh impressions matter.

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In Tiger Woods’s piece on The Players’ Tribune, titled “Not True, Not Funny,” he wrote, “Jenkins faked an interview, which fails as a parody, and is really more like a grudge-fueled piece of character assassination.”

In Woods’s rebuttal, “Not True, Not Funny,” he wrote: “Jenkins faked an interview, which fails as a parody, and is really more like a grudge-fueled piece of character assassination. Journalistically and ethically, can you sink any lower?”

It was a shanked shot from Woods, whose well-documented personal indiscretions have left him with little moral high ground.

Because Woods’s circle is so closed, it is hard to know where his outrage ends and the outrage of the people employed by him begins. Jenkins jokingly asked Woods why he hasn’t fired Mark Steinberg, his manager who acts as his trusted caddie off the course. Woods maybe wasn’t the only one who failed to see the humor there.

Steinberg and Woods declined to comment. In an email on their behalf, Woods’s spokesman, Glenn Greenspan, said they believed the matter to be closed. “We have nothing further to add,” he wrote.

Like Jeter, Woods has perfected the art of saying a lot but revealing little. Maybe all the vacuous questions — and the non-questions that begin, “Talk about ... ” — have left Woods weary of the journalist-athlete dance. But Woods fouls off even the most thoughtful questions, leaving golf writers and satirists alike without much more than the one-dimensional sketch that Jenkins turned into a caricature.

On Wednesday, Christina Kim, who has been a lightning rod for criticism on the women’s tour because of her flamboyance, was asked about the Jenkins-Woods alpha-dogfight. During any other week, Kim might have been the biggest story in golf. On Sunday in Mexico, she won for the first time in nine years. Her victory came three years after she contemplated suicide while waging a private battle with depression that she took public in 2012.

Kim marveled at Woods’s ability over the years to seemingly not care or dignify what is said or written about him.

“That is one reason why he is superhuman,” she said.

Kim liked that he chose to show his warrior side, fighting back using Jenkins’s choice of weapons: words.

“Whoever it was that wrote it, whether it was him or Steiny, I liked the fact that he responded to it,” Kim said.

She added, “I thought it showed incredible strength to be able to show that: ‘Hey, what you said caused me to feel this. This hurt me.’ I feel like that showed a lot more strength than if he hadn’t acknowledged it.”

There’s a line made famous by Dorothy Parker, oft-repeated by Jenkins: “Wit has truth in it.” But too often lately, in golf’s wars of words, men trying to be witty have failed to grasp that there can be no truth without humanity.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B14 of the New York edition with the headline: Legends Trade Less-Than-Stellar Shots. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe